Movie Review | 'Rush Hour 2'

Making Fun With Feet and Tongue

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: August 3, 2001

magine a business where people give you money and you give them back absolutely nothing," says a smooth-talking Hong Kong gangster (John Lone) toward the end of Brett Ratner's "Rush Hour 2." He's not talking about the movie industry but trying to explain the complicated international counterfeiting scheme that provides this ramshackle sequel with the semblance of a plot. Fans of the first "Rush Hour," which earned nearly $250 million worldwide, will not fork over their cash entirely in vain. Though it lacks some of the high-spirited spark of the original — it often feels like the fifth or sixth rather than the second in a franchise series — the action and humor are enough to make an hour and a half pass quickly and pleasantly.

At the end, as is customary, outtakes show Jackie Chan messing up the stunts he has just performed with apparent effortlessness and Chris Tucker blowing the lines that have exploded from his mouth like an endless string of firecrackers.

But back to the beginning: once again Mr. Chan plays Lee, a buttoned-down Hong Kong police inspector, and Mr. Tucker is Carter, his motor-mouthed L.A.P.D. counterpart. Reunited in Hong Kong, where Carter has come for a vacation (hoping to score some mu shu, an innocuous menu phrase that Mr. Tucker manages to turn into a nonsensical double-entendre).

Before long — about two and a half minutes into the movie, which takes its title seriously — the mismatched, bickering partners find themselves mixed up in an incomprehensible plot that gives each man the opportunity to do what he does best. Mr. Chan dances through some uproarious martial-arts battles, using upholstered ottomans, wastebaskets and cabinet doors as impromptu weapons, and Mr. Tucker unleashes a steady stream of threats, put-downs, pickup lines and non sequiturs, some of them in what sounds like Chinese. (Meanwhile, Mr. Chan continues to make comic hay out of his troubles with English, an enterprise in which he is joined by Roselyn Sanchez, who plays a Puerto Rican Secret Service agent with a heavy accent and an exhibitionist streak.)

The action stunts are not as wild and the jokes not as funny as the first time around, and the plot makes even less sense. But Mr. Chan and Mr. Tucker are always fun to watch. Mr. Tucker has an unusual comic talent: when you stop to think about it, nothing he does or says is especially funny (and Jeff Nathanson's script doesn't give him a whole lot to work with), but his calculated exuberance, his unwillingness to let go of a riff until it gets a laugh, produces a giddy, hilarious momentum. His best moment comes in the film's hectic climax when he launches into a mock-indignant tirade at a Las Vegas casino that invokes Nelson Mandela, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Lionel Richie (in the film's one authentically funny line).

Mr. Tucker and Mr. Chan have an easy rapport, and the friction between their characters has inevitably cooled a bit. Luckily the filmmakers have found a foil for both of them in the diminutive person of Zhang Ziyi, who flew through the air in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Here she plays a scowling villain with a fondness for carefully packaged explosives. For some reason the sight of Ms. Zhang kicking Mr. Tucker in the face — something she does three or four times in the course of the movie — rendered the audience at the screening I attended helpless with laughter.

And why not? In a season of overblown, effects-laden pseudoblockbusters, "Rush Hour 2" has the virtue of honest B-movie unpretentiousness. With its kitchen-sink plotting and dirty dishwater cinematography, the movie looks and feels like one of the assembly-line Hong Kong martial- arts pictures of old. It's not particularly valuable, but it's not counterfeit either.

"Rush Hour 2" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some profanity, and in addition to the cartoonish, neck-snapping fight scenes, a few moments of more lethal violence.

RUSH HOUR 2

Directed by Brett Ratner; written by Jeff Nathanson, based on characters created by Ross La Manna; director of photography, Matthew F. Leonetti; edited by Mark Helf rich; music by Lalo Schifrin; production designer, Terence Marsh; produced by Arthur Sarkissian, Roger Birnbaum, Jay Stern and Jonathan Glickman; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 88 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.